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Bottas was crap in this race. He certainly does not deserve that seat. There are hungrier drivers out there who would do much better with that opportunity than he does. It was just so painfull to watch him drive the Merc as he did.

I see it as a mountain climb for Vettel now, in my mind the championship is done. He is too inconsistent to see him being able to mount any sort of meaningfull challenge to Hamilton over the next three races. He kind of was lucky that it is going to mexico with 5 points. It could have been much worst.

Great win for Kimi and well deserved. If Ferrari had done this kind of service for Kimi all season, their constructors tally would have been a different story. Bottas put forward a disappointingly sub-standard race today. He gave away dear constructors point with a very mediocre performance.

Verstapenn is the driver of the day for me. He came from way back in 18th, l think, to 2nd on the podium. That was a great show of driving talent.

To me it was pretty obvious at the moment: the only driver who could get a free pitstop at that point of the race was Hamilton, since he'd get behind Bottas, which meant a free pass. Everyone else would have ended up behind rival cars and at the time it wasn't unclear whether overtaking was feasible.

Pitting Vettel might have made some sense, or it may have not. It could have given him a free pitstop which brought him closer to the podium, but it would have also sent him behind and forced him to overuse his tyres overtaking slower cars, so a second pitstop would have been necessary and it's difficult to say how that would have panned out - but I doubt they could have got it any better.

(Edit: well, obviously Stroll and whoever was in front of him could also get a free stop, but I'm ignoring them for obvious reasons.)

lol. Make that two of us.
I take a mea culpa on this one. Ferrari got it spot on with Kimi and mercedes wrong with Hamilton.

Although I think if he nursed his tires he could have gone all the way to the end.
If they were going to go with a 2 stop then they should have pitted Hamilton way earlier, so he would come out behind kimi and not 4th on the track.

But credit to where it is due. Kimi drove a flawless race. The team's strategy with both Vettel (after his now, typical, lap 1 spin) and kimi was perfect.
Mercedes strategy awful. Bottas driving even worse.
to me it, it makes sense to buy him out of his contract and put ocon in that seat. At least he would show some better pace and urgency than Bottas.

You can call it unlucky and maybe it was, but they knew the rough roads were going to be hard on the cars - his team-mate drove a strategic rally to look after the car and finished on the podium as a...